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David Warren, inventor of the flight voice and data recorder
- barking 7y agoTitle is probably a bit exaggerated.
- Fnoord 7y agoThe title isn't descriptive. What is this article about, in a nutshell?
- jacquesm 7y agoThe inventor of the black box aircraft flight recorders.
- peterburkimsher 7y agoBlack box flight recorders didn't save my life directly, but I'm sure that with the number of flights I've taken in my life, my chances of dying are much lower now thanks to improved airline safety. Those improvements are a result of the investigations helped by the black box flight recorder. So it's saved my life as much as an airbag: not directly from personal experience, but by saving the source of information about a crash and improving overall safety as a result.
- icebraining 7y agoWould you have taken the same flights if planes were constantly crashing? I know I wouldn't.
- pure-awesome 7y agoYeah, from the title, it would have to be an invention that has saved the life of virtually everyone on earth. Perhaps something that prevented a nuclear apocalypse or the like. Or, at the very least, something that's saved the life of virtually every person likely to read BBC news. ;) As it turns out, it's the "black box" flight recorder. A great invention to be sure, but hardly of the scale just described.
- prvc 7y agoThe inventor's name was David Warren. The invention was the flight recorder. Perhaps the title could convey this information, making it more informative on its own.
- jacquesm 7y agoThe BBC has figured out that if they give away the article content in the title people won't click.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI hope their analytics will indicate "people leave as soon as they get to the paragraph where it starts implying he invented the flight recorder" as well.
- jacobush 7y agoThat would only tell them it worked as intended? And maybe they should put the reveal even further in?
- GordonS 7y agoBBC news has gone slowly but steadily downhill over the past decade - the dumbing down, FUD and clickbait headlines are perhaps the final steps in it's slow march to becoming tabloid news.
- simonswords82 7y agoCouldn't agree more. It's like the editors of the Daily Mail all upped and left to go work at the BBC.
- PakG1 7y agoUnfortunately, could say that about a lot of other news media too.
- 7y ago
- shusson 7y ago> The pilots' union responded with fury, branding the recorder a snooping device, and insisted "no plane would take off in Australia with Big Brother listening" interesting I never thought this from the pilots perspective.
- jhbadger 7y agoYeah, I suppose they thought that the recordings would used primarily to assign blame to pilots, but I don't think this has been the case. Even when the cause of a crash is assigned to "pilot error", there is a general recognition that it is a failure of the whole system and that the plane often didn't give (or gave misleading) information to the pilots.
- throw0101a 7y agoI think one way of assuaging these types of concerns in ensuring that the contents are not externally accessible. I've heard similar privacy rumblings about putting 'dashcams' in cockpits, but as long as they're not streaming and only accessible either (a) in post-crash debris, or (b) some kind of NTSB 'warrant' for near-misses, I think that may lessen concerns.
- shoo 7y agoanecdotally: i have heard that new equipment that gets installed in or near the driver's compartment in trains needs to be built to be extremely rugged. Some drivers are suspicious that new equipment is to let management spy on them or automate away part of their jobs, and will endeavour to render it non-functional.
- WalterBright 7y agoI've advocated that the CVR record cockpit video, too. Lots of crash investigations have difficulty answering questions like what was the pilot looking at, what was he doing, what the instruments were saying, what were the switch positions, what was visible out the windows, even who was in the seat. The objections were the same.
- Kaiyou 7y agoYeah.. probably not. I never even travelled via plane.
- sho 7y agoIt's a good reminder of the bubble the average HN reader is likely in - including me, and apparently this BBC writer - that something like 80% of people have never flown.
- alias_neo 7y agoIn the UK, we're on a tiny little island. If we want to go anywhere interesting, we generally have to fly. Also it's often significantly cheaper than trains to continental Europe.
- icebraining 7y agoMost people can't afford to "go anywhere interesting."
- alias_neo 7y agoI understand a some can't afford to, I don't believe "most people" can't afford to. The other commenter said 25% of Brits haven't flown (according to the Telegraph). Given you can get half way across the world without flying the total number of people who haven't left these isles should be a bit lower.
- icebraining 7y agoI meant worldwide, not just UK. BBC isn't restricted to the UK.
- alias_neo 7y agoYou replied to my comment about the UK, it's only fair for me to assume we're still talking about the UK since you didn't specify. I agree that world-wide "most" is likely correct.
- Hitton 7y ago>He recorded the rest of the flight, thinking that even if he died in that limping transport plane, "at least I'd have proved the bastards wrong!" >"But unfortunately we didn't prang - we just landed safely…" Priceless.
- nottorp 7y ago<quote> He charged friends a penny to listen to cricket matches, and within a few years was selling home-made copies at five shillings each. </quote> Looks to me that he was one of the first audio pirates as well...
- FearNotDaniel 7y agoCopies of the crystal radio, not copies of the audio stream. Unless he also managed to invent a tape recorder, duplicator and playback device, then sell the latter to his friends so that he could sell them the recordings...
- MarkMc 7y agoHospitals should record audio and video to systematically reduce accidents and infections, the way that data recorders have systematically reduced aircraft accidents. A few years ago I was severely immunocompromised and treated in an isolated hospital room. Too frequently a doctor or nurse would forget to wash their hands before touching me or my IV line, or would then pick up a pen they had dropped on the floor, or would touch their beeper, or would sneeze into their hands, or some other lapse in hygene. One time an unusual situation and distracted nurse led to my IV line having a large amount of air in the line, which would have been pumped into my bloodstream if I hadn't stopped the machine. Of course, the patient would need to be convinced that it was worth the loss of privacy. And the nurses would need to be convinced that individual nurses would not be blamed.
- WalterBright 7y ago> And the nurses would need to be convinced that individual nurses would not be blamed. Not using that information to assign blame is crucial. It must only be used to evaluate changes in procedures and equipment that will improve outcomes. Legislation that guarantees that such recordings are inadmissible in court would help a lot.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoAre you aware of how ridiculous some hygenic laws in hospitals are? Basically if you would follow the rules, your hands would be festering, open wounds within a week. This unrealistic, human nature blind, algorithmic thinking which grinded the rules "ignoreable" in the first place, is what you need to solve. The result may look stupid (japanes train conductor hand signs), and may even feel counterintuitive (UVW-Colour on all the doorhandles) and it might also need to acknowledge that some "basic equipment" - like rubbergloves, are for the wearer a health hazard. https://www.dermnetnz.org/topics/occupational-skin-disease/ https://www.dermnetnz.org/topics/occupational-skin-disease/ Sorry if someone weights his own health higher then yours during his/her working hours. No surveilance in the world will encourage people to ruin there hands.
- contingencies 7y agoA 1950s colonial mindset which said nothing good could come out of this country, and everything good would get invented in either the UK, or Germany or America. As an Australian who left the country owing to a perceived lack of R&D opportunities far later on, in 2001, and had never heard this sentiment articulated, I found this quote very interesting. It is a shame that, even to date, stories behind the many Australian inventions are not taught in Australian schools. We are responsible for so many interesting things: wifi, samba, rsync, Wikileaks, TCP half-open scanning, rubber hose cryptography, plastic money, wave-piercing multihulls, power boards, ultrasound, pacemakers, feature-length film, photolithography, refrigeration, permaculture, plain tobacco packaging, swim briefs, medical penicillin, bionic ears, electric drills, winged keels, plastic lenses, inflatable emergency rafts, New Zealand, etc. Perhaps the Australian government is to blame: having been outside for so long, looking in, it seems they (especially one of the two major parties) consistently de-fund, de-nature and over-regulate the educational and cultural sectors of society while failing to provide viable avenues for R&D to retain talent in the country. Their biggest 'program' seems to be reducing tax on large-scale R&D expenses ... perhaps not realising that the very nature of Australia's economy makes it a terrible place (~zero supply chain, very high costs, very small market, no VC, miles from anywhere, timezone unique in the English speaking world) to perform most R&D.
- gumby 7y agoI just went to a funeral in the USA. It seems so Aussie to glue jokes to the coffin and it feels like that would never happen here (I'm an Aussie so perhaps biased).